Distant Light (10 page)

Today I surprised the boy while he was praying.

I arrived there in the afternoon. I stopped the car in the usual place, climbed over the fallen tree trunks and walked round the blank wall of the little house, as far as the open door.

I looked in. But there was no one.

“Are you there?” I called quietly, in that great silence.

No reply.

So I went in. I took a few steps into the kitchen. I went to look round the corner where the fireplace is.

No one.

I sat on a chair, sat there waiting, just in case the boy had gone out to do his business in the woods and would then return.

But he didn’t come back.

There was absolute silence.

I sat there for a while. I got up to leave. But before going out of the door, it occurred to me to go and have a look upstairs.

I began to climb the wooden staircase, going up very quietly, cautiously, trying not to make a noise, I don’t know why.

When I got to the top and turned the corner and looked into the big room above, I immediately saw the boy.

He was kneeling down, on the bare floorboards, by his little iron bed, with his hands together.

I froze.

The boy was so absorbed that he still hadn’t realized I was there.

“What are you doing?” I asked, quietly.

Only then did he notice me.

He looked up quickly, gazed at me in surprise, with his round eyes.

“I’m praying,” he replied.

“Who are you praying to?”

“Nobody.”

“So why are you praying?”

“This is what they’ve taught me.”

A little later, when we were both back in the kitchen and the boy had put his exercise books onto the table to do his homework and had opened them flat, rubbing his hand up and down the spine and pressing hard, and I was sitting nearby, about to leave, it suddenly occurred to me to ask him:

“But what do they teach you at school? What subjects do you study?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I see?” I asked, stretching my hand a little toward the exercise book.

He let me take it. I turned the pages. They were full of words written large and drawings with colored pencils. At the bottom were crosses and low marks written down in red by the teacher. Very low marks: three, four, one, even a zero.

“I’ve lots of them!” he said.

He got up from the chair, and ran to get some more exercise books from the dresser.

He brought them to me. I began leafing through them, starting from those at the bottom of the pile.

I opened the first. I could hardly believe it: the curves of each letter had been formed on badly-drawn rows of little sticks, not even upright, splattered all over the place with enormous blotches of ink.

“But do they still teach you to write your letters on sticks?” I said amazed.

“Not anymore!” he replied. “That’s an old exercise book.”

I looked at him. He looked at me too, in that absolute silence, in that house in the middle of the woods. I suddenly noticed that his chin was quivering, as though he was about to cry, and his large round eyes were filled with a veil of tears.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him, closing the book.

“I’m no good at school!” he said, lowering his eyes. “I can’t learn anything! The teacher’s always giving me bad marks! The others make fun of me!”

“Maybe you can’t see very well!” I tried saying to cheer him up. “Maybe you can’t see the blackboard very well. It happens sometimes …”

He shook his head, trying not to cry in front of me.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! I can’t see the blackboard, I can’t see anything!”

“Do you want me to go and see the teacher?” I asked.

He looked at me again wide-eyed.

“Oh no, no!” he replied in terror.

I remained there a little longer, while the boy did his homework. I heard him sighing every now and then in that deep silence. He was writing, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth and with his face almost touching the book.

When I left the house and reached the car, parked in the woods on the other side of those large fallen trees, a moment before I got inside I saw the driver’s door had been dented.

I was shocked.

“What could have happened?” I thought in amazement, opening the door and closing it again to see whether it still worked.

The window was intact but the lower part of the door was dented and pushed in, as though something enormous had crashed heavily against it.

“What could have happened?” I thought, confused. “There’s no
one here, in this deserted place. It must have been an animal, but a large animal, a wild boar … It must have struck it as it ran down the slope from the woods, it must have seen the car at the last moment, or perhaps it didn’t see it at all. It must have been unable to swerve away, it must have crashed against it as it thrust forward with its muscular shoulders, covered with bristles, its great head and snout with those tusks sticking out, before managing to change direction, grunting in great pain in the thick darkness of the wood …”

Last night, standing stock still behind the corner of that group of houses in the deserted and sleeping village, in that stretch of road barely lit by the streetlamp that rasps as it sways with each gust of wind, I waited for the main door in the dark frontage to open, and for the dead children to come out one by one from the school.

“It ought to be open by now!” I thought, since time was passing but the door hadn’t opened.

Just the light rasp of that street lamp in the silence of the village deep in sleep.

“Sometimes it happens …” I told myself, “when children haven’t behaved themselves, and the teacher makes them stay for another ten minutes, even though the time for the end of the lesson has passed, even though the children are impatient to leave their desks and rush out …”

Finally the door opened. The children left, with their black smocks, their schoolbags.

They walked off in silence, without saying goodbye, each going his own way.

When they had all left, I came out from behind the corner, almost running to get to the door before it closed again.

I crossed the small street diagonally.

The entrance was still open, but it seemed as though the double doors were already moving.

In the darkness, you couldn’t see who was closing them.

I almost ran up the few steps and went inside, my heart racing, into the darkness.

You couldn’t see anything, there was just that faint light that seeped in from the streetlamp outside, whose weak beam reached just as far as the hall inside, revealing the outline of an old teacher’s desk opposite the entrance, with flights of steps on either side and a metal railing.

“I’m closing. What do you want?” I heard a voice saying, in the darkness, in a quiet, kindly manner.

I turned round. In the half-light I glimpsed the outline of a short, stocky man wearing a work coat.

“It must be the janitor …” I thought.

“What do you want?” the voice asked me again, though amiably.

“I’d like to talk to the teacher,” I said, approaching him in the darkness.

“Which teacher?”

“Why do you ask? How many are there?”

“There are two: one for the morning and one for the night school.”

“The one for the night school.”

“He’s already gone.”

“But I was there outside! No one else left, apart from the children!”

“The teachers leave from the door at the back.”

I moved further forward toward the janitor. Now that my eyes were growing a little more accustomed to the dark, I could make out his head: it was large, bald, cheerful, an old rustic face.

“What do you want to talk to the teacher about?” he asked me again.

“I wanted to ask him about a dead child.”

“Which dead child?” he asked smiling in the dark. “All the children in the night school are dead.”

“I don’t know his name. He doesn’t know it either. He must have forgotten it. He says his school friends call him Putty.”

The man studied me from close up, in the dark, with his broad lopsided head, his poor eyes squinting slightly to see me better.

“Ah, yes, yes! Putty!” he smiled.

A moment later he continued to close the entrance doors.

“I really have to shut now,” he said. “But you can stay a while, if you want. The teacher isn’t here, but you can talk to me, though I’m just the janitor.”

He closed the entrance completely. The darkness wasn’t so heavy now. The only light coming in was from a small half-moon pane of glass over the entrance.

“It’s not surprising that the boy says he can’t see anything!” I suddenly thought, now that the janitor had completely shut the doors,
locking them with two small bolts that went into the floor, and then with another larger bolt and the lock, turning the key and counting the number of turns under his breath so he wouldn’t forget any of them.

He put the large key into his work coat pocket.

“Come with me!” he said eventually, taking me under the arm. “I’ll show you the school.”

“But I can’t see anything!” I said.

“You can see, you can see …” he said kindly, as we climbed a flight of steps. “You just have to let your eyes get used to the darkness. Then it’s really not so dark … There’s always some light from outside, from the streetlamp, which comes through the curtains from the gaps between them, between the two parts that never completely close, even though we try really hard two or three times to draw them across, trying to get them to join completely….”

He was panting slightly as he climbed the steps holding my arm.

“I shouldn’t be doing this job anymore,” he said meanwhile. “I’ve been doing it for such a long time that I’d be sorry to stop … I’ve been here since I wasn’t much more than a lad. Sometimes I used to play with the children. When the bell rang and they saw me going along the corridor they used to run after me, they used to pull me all over the place with their little arms …”

We arrived upstairs and turned into the dark corridor, along which I thought I could see the doors of the classrooms from what little light
filtered in from between the edges of the curtains not completely drawn.

I glanced at him now and then as he carried on walking, holding me by the arm.

He stopped for a moment before he began speaking again.

“Janitor here! Janitor there! They used to call me from the classrooms when the inkwells needed filling up, in those wooden desks they used to have, all riddled with compass holes. It was always running out, I was always having to rush about with that tin canister full of ink, refilling the inkwells again. They sat there watching, biting their lips so as not to laugh, nudging each other, while the ink came out of the spout and refilled those glass inkwells they used to have in the middle of the desk, on the top edge. Which hadn’t really run out at all. It was them, they filled the inkwells with bits of blotting paper to make them dry up faster, so they could have fun watching me arrive with the tin to fill them up again. They used to dip their pens into that sludge of ink and blotting paper, there were always those bits of fluff in the words they wrote in their exercise books, they tried to pick them off with their fingers before they started writing again, from the tip of the nib, they even used to pull the nib out of its holder to pick them off more easily, they always had their fingers all black with ink. They would change the nibs, pulling them out of their little boxes. There were copper, steel, gold nibs, and different shapes: some like a tower,
a lance, a stick … Every child had his own favorites. That’s exactly what they used to be called: the tower, the lance, the stick … They used to go to the stationer and they’d say, give me a lance, or three sticks, two towers … And the stationer would go and get the right box. Janitor, janitor! The ink is finished! they’d yell out from the classrooms, with their little voices. And I’d go running … At that time I was the morning janitor, when I first came here. Well, I mean, let’s say … when I was alive.”

This time I was the one who stopped. But his hand pressed my arm more firmly, affectionately, as we continued walking along the corridor.

I could hear a slight noise, from his mouth. I turned toward him. Now that my eyes had become more accustomed to the darkness, I saw that he was waggling the top plate of his denture up and down with his tongue, either out of habit or because it was bothering him.

“I ask you, how could I have stopped?” he continued. “I like having children around me! So I carried on as the janitor …”

We had reached a bend in the corridor, which continued on with numerous other small doors, behind which you could imagine blackboards, desks.

“Which is that boy’s classroom?” I tried asking the dead janitor, in the darkness.

“You mean Putty? I’ll show you … There, it was that one! But the desks and blackboard are no longer the same, of course …”

I stopped in front of the door.

“Why do you say it was? I’m talking about now! About the little boy who comes to the night school now!”

He made no reply. I could hear the sound of his hand, the one that wasn’t holding my arm, which was scratching his large bald head, in the dark.

“He was a strange boy …” he continued. “I don’t know why, but he was strange. He always kept himself to himself, you never knew what he was thinking. Is he a child? Is he really a child? I used to wonder. Not because he didn’t behave like a child but, quite the opposite, because he was more of a child than the others. He was so much of a child that he didn’t even seem like a child. He was always by himself, even though he wanted to make friends, to play with the others, when they wanted him. But he wasn’t very good at playing. He didn’t seem to be playing. He went too far. It seemed as though he couldn’t even join in and yet, at the same time, he used to throw himself into the game so much that it didn’t seem just a game for him but a question of life and death. He used to tire quickly, his face turned bright burning red, he sweated more than the others. When he threw himself into a game he couldn’t stop, the others used to shake him by the shoulders to make him understand the game had come to an end, but he didn’t understand, he couldn’t accept it. They would go off and leave him alone. You know … you get to know children well, seeing so many of them, living among them …”